Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Kofi, we've got a problem.

Surprisingly Jerusalem was not included in the database of National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) we use in Panoramio. We thought that such a important city should be included, so we manually added it. Just now we realize how clever was the people from NGA "ignoring" the city.

After receiving e-mails, posts in the forum and comments to some photos complaining about the status of Jerusalem, we are aware of the problem. After all, hundreds of diplomats from United Nations have not solved this problem in 40 years.

Israelians and Jewish insist that the whole city of Jerusalem belongs to Israel. Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs claim the eastern part of the city to Palestine.

UN position says that the western part of the city belongs to Israel and the eastern part to an Arab state that still doesn't exist, so for the moment to a territory called West Bank. That's how it is in Panoramio..

However Panoramio's location system of photos can't distinguish subtles differences of hundreds of meters, thus some points located in the eastern part of Jerusalem appear in Panoramio as located in Israel.

Joaquín suggestion is not to make any statements about the "territory" in which Jerusalem is located. (e.g. to mark photos of Jerusalem just as "Jerusalem", not "Jerusalem > Israel" nor "Jerusalem > West Bank"). I like this solution.

What do you think? Does anyone have the telephone number of Kofi Annan?